Leo Weisgerber

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Johann Leo Weisgerber (born February 25, 1899 in Metz ; † August 8, 1985 in Bonn ) was a German linguist and Celtologist . He is the founder of content-related grammar ( language content research ).

biography

Leo Weisgerber was the son of the head of the elementary school St. Vincenz in Metz, Nikolaus Ludwig Weisgerber, and his wife Maria, geb. Müller. He lost his mother at the age of five and his father when he was 14 years old.

Weisgerber attended the elementary school St. Vincenz in Metz, then the cathedral school St. Arnulf and the Lyceum in Metz, where he passed the final examination in 1917. Then he was in the First World War soldier in Flanders . After the end of the war, he found no refuge in his hometown, which had meanwhile become French again.

He went to Bonn and began his studies in the fall of 1918 at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn in the subjects of Indo-European Studies, Comparative Linguistics, German Studies, Romance Studies and Celtology. After intermediate semesters in Munich and Leipzig , he received his doctorate in 1923 with a Celtological dissertation under Rudolf Thurneysen , the founder of German Celtology, in the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Bonn. In 1925 he completed his habilitation there with the writing language as a social form of knowledge (unpublished until 2008). In 1923 he had also passed the examination for teaching at secondary schools in the subjects of German, French and comparative linguistics.

Since 1925 Weisgerber worked at the Städtische Oberrealschule Bonn and at the same time as a private lecturer at the Bonn University, where in 1926 he also took over the representation of linguistics and the management of the linguistic seminar. From 1926 to 1927 he was also a lecturer in German and folklore at the Pedagogical Academy in Bonn, which was founded in 1925 . In 1927 he was appointed professor for comparative linguistics and Sanskrit at the University of Rostock . In 1936 he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . In 1938 he was appointed from there to the chair for General and Indo-European Linguistics at the University of Marburg , and in 1942 he moved to the University of Bonn to the chair for Celtology and General Linguistics.

He turned down offers to the Universities of Tübingen (1946) and Munich (1952) and taught in Bonn until his retirement in 1967. One of his students is Helmut Gipper , a linguist at the Universities of Bonn and Münster.

In addition to his university activities, Leo Weisgerber took on a large number of other tasks. From 1940 to 1944 he was responsible for broadcasts in the Breton language at the Rennes broadcasting station (France) , in Bonn he was co-director of the Institute for Historical Regional Studies of the Rhineland , he initiated the language and community work project in the priority program of the German Research Foundation , in which he worked with many linguists from the Federal Republic and the GDR as well as with foreign colleagues. He was a co-founder of the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim and founded the magazine Wirkendes Wort in 1950 , which is still published today.

Relationship to National Socialism

Weisgerber's relationship to National Socialism is the subject of controversy in the history of science.

On the one hand, he got into conflict for denominational reasons when he resisted the Nazi-driven closure of the Catholic elementary school in Rostock, which he himself had co-founded. The regime wanted to forbid him from sending his children to this school. In 1938 the school was closed by the Nazis. After a heated argument, especially with the Mecklenburg Gauleiter Friedrich Hildebrandt , Leo Weisgerber was happy to be able to move from Rostock to the University of Marburg .

On the other hand, he worked directly with National Socialist institutions since 1940 when he participated as an employee ( special leader ) of the propaganda department of the military commander in France. He built up a Breton-language radio program in Brittany and supported Breton attempts at autonomy in line with the National Socialist French policy. In 1941 he was involved in founding the “Celtic Institute of Brittany”. Weisgerber had been working with the Reich Security Main Office since 1944 at the latest . From 1933 to 1945, Weisgerber's writings were increasingly based on ethnic and racist ideas.

Weisgerber was never a party member. After 1945 he was classified as unencumbered and was reinstated in his professorship.

effect

Weisgerber turned away from the historical, diachronic consideration of grammar and switched to an analysis of the contemporary synchronous language. While he was still referring to Ferdinand de Saussure's suggestion in his habilitation thesis , he no longer made such references in later works in favor of other authorities. His emphasis on the role of the “mother tongue” in determining the worldview appealed - wrongly in the opinion of his critics - to Wilhelm von Humboldt . The linguist Christopher Hutton called Weisgerber's linguistic approach in his history of German linguistics during the years 1933–1945 “mother-tongue fascism”, while Weisgerber himself wanted his linguistic contributions from the time of National Socialism to be understood as implicit anti-racist and anti-Nazi resistance after 1945.

Between 1945 and 1960, the “energetic linguistics” he represented was the dominant linguistic school in Germany. His “content-related grammar” dominated the conception of the early editions of the “Duden” grammar. Against the modern linguistics appearing since the beginning of the 1960s, which followed the European structuralism and the generative grammar , he appeared repeatedly with sharp criticism (among other things in Zweimal Sprach , 1973). Since then, Weisgerber's work has been increasingly forgotten and is only continued by some of his students in Germany. Since the 1990s, Weisgerber's theses on the importance of the mother tongue for a linguistic community have been cited more frequently by Russian linguists. Before that, his work had been received in Japan and Korea, while it was not well received in Western Europe and the United States.

Weisgerber had a major influence on the development of language teaching in German, and his importance for the reform of German orthography that has been striven for since the time of National Socialism has recently received attention.

Appreciation

Weisgerber was awarded the Konrad Duden Prize of the City of Mannheim (1959), an honorary doctorate from the University of Leuven (Belgium, 1965) and the Federal Cross of Merit (1975) for his work.

proof

  1. ↑ BBF / DIPF / Archive, BIL expert body - Personal forms for teachers of secondary schools in Prussia ( Memento of the original from February 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / bbf.dipf.de
  2. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 255.
  3. ↑ Gerd Simon: fuse for explosives. Leo Weisgerber's celtological research and his work as a censorship officer in Rennes during World War II. In: Linguistic Reports. 79, 1982, pp. 30-52; Joachim Lerchenmüller: Science in the world view war. Weisgerber's work in occupied Brittany and the science policy of the SS. In: KD Dutz (Ed.): Interpretation and Re-Interpretation. 2000, pp. 175-196.
  4. ↑ Walter Boehlich : Was Walter Boehlich wrong here? In: Frankfurter Hefte. 19, 1964, pp. 731-736; Clemens Knobloch : Folk linguistic research. Studies on the restructuring of linguistics in Germany between 1918 and 1945. Niemeyer, Tübingen 2005, pp. 96–103.
  5. ↑ Klaas-Hinrich Ehlers: Saussure reading in Weisgerber's habilitation thesis. In: KD Dutz (Ed.): Interpretation and Re-Interpretation. 2000, pp. 51-66.
  6. ↑ Hubert Ivo: Leo Weisgerber's linguistic thinking: no thinking in the spirit or letters of Humboldt. In the S. (Ed.): Leo Weisgerber: Engagement and reflection. Critique of a didactically oriented linguistics. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1994, pp. 195-274.
  7. ^ Christopher Hutton: Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-Tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language. Routledge, London 1998. Yakov Malkiel, Review of Horst Geckeler: Zur Wortfelddiskussion, was similarly critical . Investigations into the structure of the word field “old, young, new” in today's French. Fink, Munich 1971. In: Foundations of Language. 12, 1971, pp. 271-285 (274 f.).
  8. ^ Leo Weisgerber: The language community as an object of linguistic research. Cologne / Opladen 1967, p. 36 f.
  9. ↑ Theodor Ickler: Attrition of the brains through writing reform. A little visit to the hunchbacked relatives: The new spelling and National Socialism . (PDF; 30 kB). In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. November 10, 2000, No. 262, features section, p. 44.

Works

The list of his publications includes 435 titles. Among them are the books of particular importance, also in terms of the history of science:

  • To lay the foundations for a holistic understanding of language. Articles 1925–1933. Edited by Helmut Gipper. Pedagogical Publishing House Schwann, Düsseldorf 1964.
  • Mother tongue and intellectual education (translated into Japanese, Korean and Russian) (1929).
  • "The connections between mother tongue, thinking and acting", in: Zeitschrift für Deutsche Bildung , 1930, issue 6
  • “Mother tongue education”, in: Franz X. Eggersdorfer et al. (Ed.), Handbuch der Erziehungswissenschaften. IV. Part. Volume 2 , Munich, 1932
  • Linguistics and national community and the educational task of our time, in: Journal for German Education , 1934, issue 6, pp. 189-303
  • The position of language in the structure of total culture , 1934
  • "Mother tongue and folk education", in: Politische Erbildung , 1937, issue 5, pp. 151–157
  • The popular forces of the mother tongue , 1939
  • "The German language in the structure of German popular life", in: Gerhard Fricke et al. (Ed.), Of German Kind in Language and Poetry. Volume 1 , Stuttgart. 1941, pp. 3-41
  • The discovery of the mother tongue in European thought , 1948
  • The meaning of the word “German”. Göttingen 1949.
  • From the powers of the German language . Pedagogical publisher Schwann, Düsseldorf. 4 volumes 1949–1950.
    • Volume I: Fundamentals of content-related grammar . 3., rework. Edition. 1962.
    • Volume II: The linguistic design of the world . 3., rework. Edition. 1962.
    • Volume III: The mother tongue in building our culture . 2., ext. Edition. 1957.
    • Volume IV: The historical power of the German language . 2., ext. Edition. 1959.
  • “The teaching of the language community”, in: Frankfurter Hefte , 1965, Heft 3, pp. 197–205
  • The gateway to the mother tongue . Pedagogical Verlag Schwann, Düsseldorf 1954, 9th, unchanged. Edition 1968.
  • Language Law and European Unity (1959).
  • Translation error in the South Tyrol conflict (1961).
  • The four stages in the study of languages (1963).
  • Twice Language (1973).

literature

  • Hans Arens: Linguistics. The course of their development from antiquity to the present. 2nd Edition. Freiburg / Munich 1969, pp. 531-547.
  • Nelly Blanchard: Un agent du Reich à la rencontre des militants bretons: Leo Weisgerber . Brest 2003.
  • Klaus D. Dutz (Ed.): Interpretation and Re-Interpretation. On the occasion of the 100th birthday of Johann Leo Weisgerber (1899–1986). Munster 2000.
  • Helmut Gipper (Ed.): Language - Key to the World. Festschrift for Leo Weisgerber on the completion of the 60th year of life . Pedagogical Verlag Schwann, Düsseldorf 1959. (with bibliography of Weisgerber's writings up to 1957).
  • Peter Hartmann: The nature and effect of language in the mirror of Leo Weisgerber's theory. Heidelberg 1958.
  • Gerhard Helbig: Leo Weisgerber's language perception. In: German lessons. 13, 1961 and 15, 1963.
  • Gerhard Helbig: History of modern linguistics. Munich 1971, pp. 119–161.
  • Wilhelm Köller: Philosophy of grammar. Stuttgart 1988, pp. 251-257.
  • Wolfgang Lorenz : On some questions about the connection between language and society - a critical examination of Leo Weisgerber. Dissertation A . Leipzig 1965, DNB 481431780 .
  • Jürgen Roth: Methodology and ideology of the concept of the language community. Technical historical and systematic aspects of a sociological theory of language with Leo Weisgerber. Dissertation Frankfurt am Main 2004. (PDF)
  • Bernhard Weisgerber: Mother tongue and language community. For Leo Weisgerber's 100th birthday. In: active word. Bonn 1999, pp. 1-13.
  • Bernhard Weisgerber: "Habent sua fata libelli". Lecture on the publication of Leo Weisgerber's habilitation thesis from 1924: "Language as a social form of knowledge" on October 26, 2008 in Kassel. In: The Language Service. 52nd volume, 5th issue, 2008, pp. 264–270.

Web links

Wiktionary: Content-related grammar  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Wiktionary: Language content research  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
personal data
SURNAME Weisgerber, Leo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Weisgerber, Johann Leo (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German linguist and Celtologist
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Metz
DATE OF DEATH August 8, 1985
Place of death Bonn